YInMn Blue

See also also also also also also Viagra

See also also also also also also also Post-It notes (specifically, the adhesive they use)

Sweetness is, as you’ve defined it, a chemical property, so it’s not one of the things I was talking about being “easy” to predict.

But pigmentation is a physical property, as it is a reaction between a molecule and inbound photons†. Likewise, the output of a “pigmentation calculation”—if we know of one—should just be more photons. Wavefunction in, wavefunction out.

We know how photons work. We know how our eyes perceive them. As long as we have a framework for figuring out how a material physically manipulates the photons absorbed by it, we should be able to calculate the pigmentation of every simple molecule by brute force.

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† The pigmented molecule can be in the chemical form or physical state that gives it that pigment very ephemerally, due to e.g. a clock reaction. But at any given instant in time, we can say “the molecule is in this state, so what function does it apply to inbound photons now.”

Note also that I’m defining pigmentation here, not total appearance, so this ignores any fluorescence, phosphorescence, triboluminescence, Cherenkov radiation, etc. that the molecule also emits and which we perceive as light. All those purely-physical processes are able to be admitted into this model without actually making it untenable, but it becomes harder to understand, since it becomes a Feynman diagram thing, rather than simple transformation over wavefunctions.

Getting all the details in such a model right seems to be the same kind of problem as getting a weather-prediction model right—in that, as you add factors, all your predictions asymptotically approach correctness, with smaller and smaller preturbations.

Those preturbations might cause one or two elements “local” to some part of the configuration-space to be misclassified; but remember, here, that the point is to get a predictive screening test, one that hopefully gives more false positives than false negatives. Any time it says “this molecule might look cool if you made it”, we can just make it and see; and then, if it looks different than we were expecting, we can refine the model with the additional details that make that novel molecule also appear correctly in it.

"At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature."

further on

"The paper goes on to react FOOF [dioxygen difluoride] with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth...), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."

It is not necessarily the case that a patent will lead to a commercially available product. But, a patent is a public document. At the end of the protected time period, the invention described by the patent is available for the public to use.

If the patent didn't exist, the secrets behind an invention would be hidden from the public. But, this comes with a risk for the company in question... if someone else figured out your secret (independently), then you would have no protections and your secret could then be used by this new competitor. A patent is a defense against this. An inventor agrees to make their secrets public, in exchange for a time-limited monopoly to their invention.

Both parties gain something. The public gets to know how something works -- and the rights to use this knowledge for free in the future. The inventor gets a short-term monopoly on this IP and immediate protection from competitors to make money.

> It doesn't seem clear to me how the ability for something to be privately patented suddenly makes it accessible to the public.

Because the institution (normally a University) now has a motive to market this invention. Before Bayh-Dole, something like this pigment would have been noted in a lab notebook and maybe the bright blue color would have been mentioned in a journal article. But, because the University can now use this IP to license the pigment commercially, there is a motive to pull this IP off the shelf at the lab and into the market.

> If government funded research discovered this pigment, then DuPont can still benefit from the process-- they'd just have to pay royalties to the government (i.e. the taxpayers) whose money gave rise to the invention in the first place.

Which would you rather handle the licensing of the IP for this new pigment? A large federal bureaucracy, which is now on the hook for managing the IP for all government grants, and really doesn't have any strong motivation to market the IP? Or the University which stands to make a lot of money to help fund their research and academic missions? One of those entities is more motivated to get this invention licensed and (hopefully) available to the public.

Again, Bayh-Dole was designed specifically for this purpose -- to move the gatekeepers of government funded research away from the federal government and out to the institutions that had more motivation to push these discoveries to the public faster.

I haven't read the The Entrepreneurial State, but the opening synopsis on Wikipedia supports this logic.

> book written by Mariana Mazzucato which argues that the United States' economic success is a result of public and state funded investments in innovation and technology, rather than a result of the small state, free market doctrine that often receives credit for the country's strong economy. (from the Wikipedia page)

A key driver behind the US economy has been public and state funded research. The mechanism that this research makes it to the broader market (faster) is by moving the licensing away from the federal government and towards the research institutions.